How angry do people have to be to start a riot? Is being too poor to shop reason enough?
Walmart has a problem these days, and it is resulting in plummeting revenues. People are too poor to shop there anymore. They have to live from paycheck to paycheck, or unemployment check to unemployment check, and tend to go to the dollar store rather than blow big money at the mega store. Target’s earnings are up because they focus on the affluent, meaning $60,000 to $80,000 wage earners. They also have continued to add food items to their stores, competing on price with regular super markets. Dollar stores are even undercutting Walmart when it comes to food items.
There have been huge riots in England, disturbances in Italy and France, and most recently arsonists have started blowing up cars in Germany. So far, flash mob riots in the United States have been limited to outbreaks in Philadelphia and Cleveland.
The question is this: If in the heart of America people can’t even afford Walmart anymore, are we headed for the anger that boils over into violence as it’s begun to happen around the world? Egypt and the United States might look different in many respects, including the form of government, but the inequity of wealth is the same. So, too, is total absence of social mobility caused by the lack of a quality public education system to level the playing field.
If the average blue-collar worker in America is permanently unemployed, damn worried about slipping into that category, doesn’t have a college education and has no realistic way to get one, and is struggling mightily to feed their family at the dollar store, it seems plausible that the Tea Party is a mild reaction to an unfair and humiliating situation.
Let’s all try to find constructive ways to work toward greater equality and opportunity. Men, the hardest hit by the recession, need particular, specific help getting back into the workforce. And in the meantime, the one thing that is sure to fuel greater resentment is the utter lack of acknowledgment by those in Boston, Wall Street. and Silicon Valley of just how bad the situation is for a giant swath of our citizens.
—Photo by KevinDooley on Flickr
I’ve been throwing this out there for all of these great conversations about class and inequality, so I’ll do it here too. Check out a “resource based economy” on http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com and http://www.thevenusproject.com. It advocates a different kind of approach to a social system based on solving our problems with the scientific method and technology.
One of the more usual causes of revolutions happen not because of the discontent of the lower orders. They have little means to effect change. Revolutions take off when the existing order ALSO hurts the interests of the minor ‘aristocracy’ and the upper middle class – the immediate servants of the elite with the people under their direct command, the people who actually do the daytoday running of the various functions of society. This existing order is starting to hurt the upper middle class in the west Conditions are ripening for an overthrow. Youth unemployment here in the uk for… Read more »
Mr. Black (through no fault of his own, I’m sure, since I generally agree with his Tea-Bagger-Tantrum-Party assessments) neglected to mention their rabid hatred of Obama in general. It’s almost as if the Tea Party movement in its infancy was angriest at mainstream Republicans & the former administration for screwing up so badly they felt that the country got “stuck” with a black president & felt there was no choice but to mount an assault from the far-away enchanted land of Wing-Nuttery.
Inequality and poverty are not the same thing. Inequality is not really an economic problem, it’s a political problem. At least, it becomes a political problem if there are expectations that are not being met, or if there is a perceived unfairness about inequality. There is no magic tipping point at which society rebels against economic inequality by staging a class war. Some societies tolerate extreme gaps between rich and poor and hardly think anything of it, while others are sensitive about the slightest gap. The recent revolutions in the Middle East are not generally powered by those with nothing… Read more »
There have been huge riots in England, disturbances in Italy and France, and most recently arsonists have started blowing up cars in Germany. So far, flash mob riots in the United States have been limited to outbreaks in Philadelphia and Cleveland. Which one was caused by “being too poor to shop?” The riots in England were started as a protest against police shooting to death a 29 year old black man. Among the rioters were many upper and middle class youths. The last “disturbances” in Italy, as far as I can tell, were last year when migrant workers were pissed… Read more »
It will happen. People get hungry enough and they will take to the streets. America is a lot different in that our citizens have not experienced real hunger here in decades. It is also different in that we have a different class of ruling wealthy. They’ve never had to personally drive men like the robber barons of years gone by. They have no skill in controlling groups of people with fists and brutality. The situation is tenuous.